June

Brace yourselves, because I'm turning the old fuddy-duddy up to max for this post. Alternative linkbait titles for this post are "Why HTML5 mobile apps suck" and "Get off my lawn!"
When I started coding in PHP in 1996, the alternatives were Perl and C. It was generally regarded as "easier but slower" than both of these alternatives[1]. At the time there was an argument from Perl and C coders that the sacrifices in efficiency weren't worth it for the ease of development: websites needed to render fast, and scale to what was then considered high traffic.
How PHP won
Ease of development turned out to be the killer feature of PHP. Today it is pretty firmly the dominant language of web development -- there are lots of fast-growing competitors, notably Javascript, but the installed base of PHP apps is gigantic. In fact, it's one of the most popular programming languages overall, depending how you measure these things -- only C, Java, and C++ are more popular, and when you consider that basically all non-web...